Saturday, July 26, 2014

When
geneticist Davide Piffer examined IQ-enhancing alleles at seven different
genes, he found that their average prevalence differed among human populations,
being highest in East Asians and lowest in Mbuti Pygmies (photo used with
author's approval)

My
weekly posts are now appearing on The Unz
Review (http://www.unz.com/). By accepting
Ron's invitation, I hope to reach a bigger audience and bring myself closer to
other writers in the area of human biodiversity. When people work together, or
simply alongside each other, minor differences can be ironed out and major
differences narrowed or at least accepted good-naturedly. One thing I've
learned is that academic debate can leave a legacy of hurt feelings. The
impersonal can become personal, partly because people feel attached to their
views and partly because views themselves can have personal impacts.

Working
together also creates synergy. It becomes easier to identify research
priorities, contact interested researchers, and end up with publishable
findings. At present, most HBD research involves trawling through the
literature and offering new interpretations. That's fine, but we need lab work
as well. This point came up in a 2006 interview with geneticist Bruce Lahn:

A lot of researchers studying human population genetics and evolution are strictly data miners (i.e., they generate/publish no original data). There are limitations to such an approach, as it depends on the available data and prevents certain analyses from being performed. Do you expect to see more research groups turning into pure data mining labs in the future? Or will there still be a place for independent labs generating their own data (for example, resequencing a gene in multiple individuals to study the polymorphism)?

Given the explosion of genomic data in the last decade or so, which shows no sign of slowing down any time soon, there is likely to be a proliferation of pure data miners just because there is a niche for them. But I suspect that many interesting findings will still require the combination of data mining and wet experiments to provide key pieces of data not already available in public databases. In this regard, labs that can do both data mining and wet experiments can have an advantage over labs that can only do data mining. (Gene Expression, 2006)

Lab
work will probably have to be offshored, not because it's cheaper to do
elsewhere but because the "free world" is no longer the best place
for unimpeded scientific inquiry.A Hong
Kong team is conducting a large-scale investigation into the genetics of
intelligence, and nothing comparable is being done in either North America or
Western Europe. Cost isn't the reason.

A
few suggestions for research:

Human variation
in IQ-enhancing alleles

We
know that human intellectual capacity has risen through small incremental
changes at very many genes, probably hundreds if not thousands. Have these
changes been the same in all populations?

Davide Piffer (2013) has tried to answer this question by using a small subset of
these genes. He began with seven SNPs whose different alleles are associated
with differences in performance on PISA or IQ tests. Then, for fifty human
populations, he looked up the prevalence of each allele that seems to increase
performance. Finally, for each population, he calculated the average prevalence
of these alleles at all seven genes.

The
average prevalence was 39% among East Asians, 36% among Europeans, 32% among
Amerindians, 24% among Melanesians and Papuan-New Guineans, and 16% among
sub-Saharan Africans. The lowest scores were among San Bushmen (6%) and Mbuti
Pygmies (5%). A related finding is that all but one of the alleles are specific
to humans and not shared with ancestral primates.

Yes,
he was using a small subset of genes that influence intellectual capacity. But
you don't need a big number to get the big picture. If you dip your hand into a
barrel of differently colored jelly beans, the colors you see in your hand will
match well enough what's in the barrel. In any case, if the same trend holds up
with a subset of 50 or so genes, it will be hard to say it's all due to chance.

Interaction
between age and intellectual capacity

These
population differences seem to widen after puberty, as Franz Boas noted a century
ago (Boas, 1974, p. 234). It may be that general intelligence was largely
confined to early childhood in ancestral humans, as a means to integrate
information during the time of life when children become familiar with their
surroundings. With increasing age, and familiarity, this learning capacity
would shut down. When modern humans began to enter environments that had higher
cognitive demands, natural selection may have favored retention of general
intelligence in adulthood, just as it favored retention of the capacity to
digest lactose wherever adults raised dairy cattle and drank milk.

After
doing a principal component analysis on covariance between the above
IQ-enhancing alleles and performance on IQ and Pisa tests, Piffer (2013) was
able to identify three alleles that show the highest loading on the first
component. Ward et al. (2014) have found that possession of these three alleles
correlates with educational performance of 13 to 14 year old children. We now
have a tool to measure the interaction between genes and age in the development
of intellectual capacity, particularly during the critical period extending
from pre-puberty to early adulthood.

Convergent
evolution

Some
human populations seem to have arrived at similar outcomes through different
evolutionary trajectories. East Asians, for instance, resemble Western
Europeans in their level of societal development, but this similar outcome has
been achieved through a different mental and behavioral package, specifically
lower levels of guilt and empathy with correspondingly higher levels of shame
and prosocial behavior. In short, East Asians tend to enforce social rules more
by external mediation (e.g., shaming, peer pressure, family discipline) than by
internal control (e.g., guilt, empathy).

This
difference probably reflects a mix of learned and innate predispositions, since
natural selection favors whatever works, regardless of how hardwired it may or
may not be. To the extent that these predispositions are hardwired, East Asians
may be less able to cope with the sort of aloneness, anonymity, and
individualism we take for granted.

It
would be easy enough to study the neurological effects of social isolation on
East Asians, and there is already suggestive evidence that such effects include
unusual outbursts of psychotic behavior. It would be harder, however, to
determine whether this malfunctioning has a heritable component.

Microcephalin -
Why does its Eurasian allele increase brain volume?

Almost
a decade ago, Bruce Lahn was among those who discovered that a gene involved in
brain growth, Microcephalin,
continued to evolve after modern humans had spread out of Africa. Its most
recent allele arose some 37,000 years ago in Eurasia and is still largely
confined to native Eurasians and Amerindians (Evans et al., 2005). Interest in
this finding evaporated when no significant correlation was found between the
Eurasian allele and higher scores on IQ tests (Mekel-Bobrov et al, 2007;
Rushton et al., 2007). Nonetheless, a later study showed that this allele
correlates with increased brain volume (Montgomery and Mundy, 2010).

The
time of origin corresponds to the entry of modern humans into seasonal
temperate environments. It also corresponds to the beginnings of Upper
Paleolithic art—realistic 3D representations of game animals on stone, clay,
bone, and ivory. The common denominator seems to be an increased capacity to
store spatiotemporal information, i.e., the ability to imagine objects,
particularly game animals, and how they move over space and time. If IQ tests
fail to measure this capacity, it may be worthwhile to test carriers of this
allele for artistic or map-reading skills.

ASPM is another gene
that regulates brain growth, and like Microcephalin it continued to evolve
after modern humans had spread out of Africa, its latest allele arising about
6000 years ago somewhere in the Middle East. The new allele then proliferated
within and outside this region, reaching higher incidences in the Middle East
(37-52%) and in Europe (38-50%) than in East Asia (0-25%). Despite its apparent
selective advantage, this allele does not seem to improve cognitive performance
on standard IQ tests. On the other hand, there is evidence that it is
associated with increased brain size (Montgomery and Mundy, 2010).

At
present, we can only say that it probably assists performance on a task that
exhibited the same geographic expansion from a Middle Eastern origin roughly
6000 years ago. The closest match seems to be the invention of alphabetical
writing, specifically the task of transcribing speech and copying texts into
alphabetical script. Though more easily learned than ideographs, alphabetical
characters place higher demands on mental processing, especially under
premodern conditions (continuous text with little or no punctuation, real-time
stenography, absence of automated assistance for publishing or copying, etc.).
This task was largely delegated to scribes of various sorts who enjoyed
privileged status and probably superior reproductive success. Such individuals
may have served as vectors for spreading the new ASPM allele (Frost, 2008; Frost, 2011).

Tay Sachs and IQ

Ashkenazi
Jews have high incidences of certain neurological conditions, particularly Tay
Sachs, Gaucher's disease, and Niemann-Pick disease. In the homozygous state
these conditions are deleterious, but in the heterozygous state they may
improve intellectual capacity by increasing neural axis length and branching.
Cochran et al. (2006) argue that this improvement could amount to about 5 IQ
points.

There
was in fact a study in the 1980s to determine whether Tay-Sachs heterozygotes
suffer from mental deficits (Kohn et al., 1988). The authors found no deficits
but did not elaborate on whether performance was above-normal on the
neuropsychological tests. They did mention that about two thirds of the
Tay-Sachs heterozygotes had education beyond high school.

The
raw data seem to be long gone, but it would not be difficult to repeat the
study with a view to studying above-normal mental performance in heterozygotes
and non-carriers.

References

Boas,
F. (1974). A Franz Boas Reader. The
Shaping of American Anthropology, 1883-1911, G.W. Stocking Jr. (ed.),
Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Saturday, July 19, 2014

Ruth
Benedict (1887-1948), much more than Franz Boas, would define the aims of
Boasian anthropology for postwar America.

When
Franz Boas died in 1942, the leadership of his school of anthropology passed to
Ruth Benedict and not to Margaret Mead. This was partly because Benedict was
the older of the two and partly because her book Patterns of Culture (1934) had already assumed a key role in
defining Boasian anthropology.

The
word "define" may surprise some readers. Wasn't Boas a Boasian? Not
really. For most of his life he believed that human populations differ innately
in their mental makeup. He was a liberal on race issues only in the sense that
he considered these differences to be statistical and, hence, no excuse for systematic
discrimination. Every population has capable individuals who should be given a chance
to rise to the limits of their potential.

He
changed his mind very late in life when external events convinced him of the
need to fight "racism," at that time a synonym for extreme nationalism
in general and Nazism in particular. In 1938, he removed earlier racialist
statements from his second edition of The
Mind of Primitive Man, and the next year Ruth Benedict wrote Race: Science and Politics to show that racism
was more than a Nazi aberration, being in fact an ingrained feature of American
life. Both of them saw the coming European conflict as part of a larger war.

This
is one reason why the war on racism did not end in 1945. Other reasons included
a fear that extreme nationalism would lead to a second Hitler and a Third World
War. How and why was never clear, but the fear was real. The two power blocs were
also competing for the hearts and minds of emerging nations in Asia and Africa,
and in this competition the West felt handicapped. How could it win while
defining itself as white and Christian? The West thus redefined itself in
universal terms and became just as committed as the Eastern bloc to converting the
world to its way of life. Finally, the rhetoric of postwar reconstruction
reached into all areas of life, even in countries like the U.S. that had emerged
unscathed from the conflict. This cultural reconstruction was a logical outcome
of the Second World War, which had discredited not just Nazism but also nationalism
in general, thereby leaving only right-wing globalism or left-wing globalism.
Ironically, this cultural change was weaker in the communist world, where people
would remain more conservative in their forms of sociality.

Ruth
Benedict backed this change. She felt that America should stop favoring a
specific cultural tradition and instead use its educational system to promote
diversity. To bring this about, she had to reassure people that a journey
through such uncharted waters would not founder on the shoals of unchanging
human nature. This fear had been addressed in Patterns of Culture (1934). Inspired by Pavlov’s research on
conditioned reflexes, she argued that people are conditioned by their culture
to think, feel, and behave in a particular way. This pattern assumes over time such
a rigid form that even a student of anthropology will assume it to be innate:

He
does not reckon with the fact of other social arrangements where all the
factors, it may be, are differently arranged. He does not reckon, that is, with
cultural conditioning. He sees the trait he is studying as having known and
inevitable manifestations, and he projects these as absolute because they are
all the materials he has to think with. He identifies local attitudes of the
1930’s with Human Nature […] (Benedict, 1989, p. 9)

She
argued that such behavioral traits cannot be innate, since they assume
different patterns in different human populations and in different time periods
of a single population. Our potential for social change is thus greater than
what we imagine, being limited only by the range of behavior that exists across
all societies. Because we underestimate this potential, we resist social change
on the grounds that it would violate a nonexistent human nature:

The
resistance is in large measure a result of our misunderstanding of cultural
conventions, and especially an exaltation of those that happen to belong to our
nation and decade. A very little acquaintance with other conventions, and a
knowledge of how various these may be, would do much to promote a rational
social order. (Benedict, 1989, p. 10)

In
contradistinction to Boas, who believed that human populations differ innately
in various mental and behavioral traits, she argued that cultural evolution had
long ago replaced genetic evolution:

Man
is not committed in detail by his biological constitution to any particular
variety of behaviour. The great diversity of social solutions that man has
worked out in different cultures in regard to mating, for example, or trade,
are all equally possible on the basis of his original endowment. Culture is not
a biologically transmitted complex. (Benedict, 1989, p. 14)

In
short, humans have turned the tables on evolution. Instead of being changed by
their environment via natural selection, they redesign it with the tools
provided by their culture. To a large degree, humans create their own
environment:

The
human animal does not, like the bear, grow himself a polar coat in order to
adapt himself, after many generations, to the Arctic. He learns to sew himself
a coat and put up a snow house. From all we can learn of the history of
intelligence in pre-human as well as human societies, this plasticity has been
the soil in which human progress began and in which it has maintained itself.
[...] The human cultural heritage, for better or for worse, is not biologically
transmitted. (Benedict, 1989, p. 14)

Since
human nature is everywhere the same, whatever works in any other culture ought
to work in America’s, and this greater diversity should pose no serious problem.
This argument would eventually be topped off by American can-doism: if other
cultures can cope with some diversity, we can do even better!

Much
more deviation is allowed to the individual in some cultures than in others,
and those in which much is allowed cannot be shown to suffer from their
peculiarity. It is probable that social orders of the future will carry this
tolerance and encouragement of individual difference much further than any
cultures of which we have experience. (Benedict, 1989, p. 273)

Such
social change would be resisted by Middletown—originally a pseudonym for
Muncie, Indiana in two sociological studies, and later a synonym for whitebread
small-town America.

The
American tendency at the present time leans so far to the opposite extreme that
it is not easy for us to picture the changes that such an attitude would bring
about. Middletown is a typical example of our usual urban fear of seeming in
however slight an act different from our neighbours. Eccentricity is more
feared than parasitism. Every sacrifice of time and tranquillity is made in
order that no one in the family may have any taint of nonconformity attached to
him. Children in school make their great tragedies out of not wearing a certain
kind of stockings, not joining a certain dancing-class, not driving a certain
car. The fear of being different is the dominating motivation recorded in
Middletown. (Benedict, 1989, p. 273)

Conclusion

Ruth
Benedict wrote well, so well that any flaws are easily missed. Much of her
reasoning revolved around the concept of cultural conditioning. Just as a dog
will salivate on hearing the tinkling of a bell, if associated with food, so
people will come to respond unthinkingly and in the same way to a situation
that occurs over and over again. Such behavior may seem innate, yet it isn't.
This part of her reasoning is true, but it is also true that natural selection
tends to hardwire any recurring behavioral response. Mental plasticity has a
downside, particularly the risks of responding incorrectly to a situation when
one is still learning. It's better to get things right the first time. In sum,
conditioned reflexes and innate reflexes both have their place, and one doesn't
preclude the other ... for either dogs or humans.

Benedict
seems on firmer ground in saying that humans are uniquely able to change the
world around themselves. Instead of having to adapt biologically to our
environment, we can invent ways to make it adapt to us. It's this manmade
environment—our culture—that does the evolving, not our genes. This view used
to be widely accepted in anthropology and has been proven false only recently. We
now know that cultural evolution actually caused genetic evolution to
accelerate. At least 7% of the human genome has changed over the last 40,000
years, and most of that change seems to be squeezed into the last 10,000, when
the pace of genetic change was more than a hundred-fold higher (Hawks et al.,
2007). By that time, humans were no longer adapting to new physical
environments; they were adapting to new cultural
environments. Far from slowing down genetic evolution, culture has speeded it
up by greatly diversifying the range of circumstances we must adapt to.

Benedict
was right in foreseeing a time when tolerance would become a virtue. Yet,
strangely enough, Middletown America is no more tolerant today than it was in
her time. Americans are simply obeying a new set of rules, whose first
commandment is now "Thou shalt not be intolerant."People are still fearful of being different
from their neighbours. It's just that the fears have another basis. People are
still insulted for being different. It's just that the insults have changed.
"Filthy pervert" has given way to "Dirty homophobe."
Mistrust of the stranger has been replaced by mistrust of those who are not
inclusive. Pierre-André Taguieff has described this new conformity in France:

[...]
over the last thirty years of the 20th century, the word "racism"
became an insult in everyday language ("racist!" "dirty
racist!"), an insult derived from the racist insult par excellence
("dirty nigger!", "dirty Jew!"), and given a symbolic
illegitimating power as strong as the political insult "fascist!" or
"dirty fascist!". To say an individual is "racist" is to
stigmatize him, to assign him to a heinous category, and to abuse him verbally
[...] The "racist" individual is thus expelled from the realm of
common humanity and excluded from the circle of humans who are deemed
respectable by virtue of their intrinsic worth. Through a symbolic act that
antiracist sociologists denounce as a way of "racializing" the Other,
the "racist" is in turn and in return categorized as an
"unworthy" being, indeed as an "unworthy" being par
excellence. For, as people say, what can be worse than racism? (Taguieff, 2013,
p. 1528)

It's
hard to believe that the sin of racism did not yet exist in Ruth Benedict's
day. The word itself was just starting to enter common use. At most, there was
a growing movement for people to be more tolerant, and even that movement was
very limited in its aims. "Tolerance" had a much less radical
meaning.

Interestingly,
Benedict did touch on the reason for Middletown's intolerance. In her book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword (1946),
she explained that human cultures enforce social rules by means of shame or
guilt. You feel ashamed if your wrongdoing is seen by another person. In
contrast, you feel guilty even if nobody else has seen it, or even if you
merely think about doing wrong. Although all humans have some capacity for both
shame and guilt, the relative importance of one or the other varies
considerably among individuals and among human populations. "Shame
cultures" greatly outnumber "guilt cultures," which are
essentially limited to societies of Northwest European origin, like Middletown.

But
how does a guilt culture survive? If a few individuals feel no guilt as long as
no one is looking, they will have an edge over those who do. Over time, they
will proliferate at the expense of the guilt-prone, and the guilt culture will
become a shame culture. It seems that this outcome does not happen because the
guilt-prone are always looking for signs of deviancy in other individuals,
however trifling it may seem. We have here the "broken windows"
theory of law enforcement:if a person
tends to break any rule, however minor, he or she will likely break a major
one, since the psychological barrier against wrongdoing is similar in both
cases. The guilt-prone will judge such people to be morally worthless and will
ultimately expel them from the community. Intolerance is the price we pay for
the efficiency of a guilt culture.

Today,
this mechanism has been turned upon itself. The new social rule—intolerance of
intolerance—will, over the not so long term, dissolve the mental makeup that
makes a guilt culture possible. Benedict did not foresee this outcome in her own
time. Middletown was too set in its ways, too monolithic, too well entrenched.
At most, one could hope for a little more leeway for the socially deviant. A
few bohemians here, a few oddballs there ...

Ruth
Benedict saw Middletown as a difficult case, particularly its extreme guilt
culture, and she drew on the language of education and psychotherapy to frame
this difficulty in terms of long-term treatment:

[…] there can be no reasonable doubt that one of the most effective ways in which to deal with the staggering burden of psychopathic tragedies in America at the present time is by means of an educational program which fosters tolerance in society and a kind of self-respect and independence that is foreign to Middletown and our urban traditions. (Benedict, 1989, pp. 273-274)

They
[the Puritans] were the voice of God. Yet to a modern observer it is they, not
the confused and tormented women they put to death as witches, who were the
psychoneurotics of Puritan New England. A sense of guilt as extreme as they
portrayed and demanded both in their own conversion experiences and in those of
their converts is found in a slightly saner civilization only in institutions
for mental diseases. (Benedict, 1989, p. 276)

By
the time of her death in 1948, Boasian anthropology had become fully mobilized
for the war on racism. This mobilization had begun in response to the rise of
Nazi Germany but was soon extended to a much larger enemy that included America
itself, as seen in the increasingly radical meanings of “racism” and “tolerance.”
Only a determined, long-term effort would bring this enemy to heel.

Sunday, July 13, 2014

The anthropologist Franz Boas is remembered for moving
the social sciences away from genetic determinism and toward environmental
determinism. In reality, he felt that genes do contribute substantially to
mental and behavioral differences ... and not just between individuals.

Most of us identify with certain great teachers of the
past: Christ, Marx, Freud … Though long dead, they still influence us and we
like to think that their teachings have come down to us intact. We know what
they believed … or so we like to think. This raises a problem when we find
discrepancies. Jesus was so humble that he resented being called good, since
only God is truly good. But then ...

Often, however, the discrepancies remain unknown. They
develop too gradually for the average person to notice and are most obvious to
those who least want to point them out, i.e., the successors of the great
teacher. Of course, the great teacher is no longer around to set things
straight.

This has happened to many belief-systems. In my last post,
I discussed how the real Sigmund Freud differed significantly from the one we
know. The same is true for Franz Boas (1858-1942), whose school of anthropology
is as much a product of his immediate disciples—Margaret Mead and Ruth
Benedict—as of Boas himself.

Today, Boas is remembered as the man who moved the
social sciences away from genetic determinism and toward environmental
determinism. His Wikipedia entry states:

Boas was one of the most prominent opponents of the
then popular ideologies of scientific racism, the idea that race is a
biological concept and that human behavior is best understood through the
typology of biological characteristics. [...] Boas also worked to demonstrate
that differences in human behavior are not primarily determined by innate
biological dispositions, but are largely the result of cultural differences
acquired through social learning.

In reality, he felt that genes do contribute
substantially to mental and behavioral differences ... and not just between
individuals. This is apparent in a speech he gave in 1894 under the title
"Human Faculty as Determined by Race."

It does not seem probable that the minds of races which show variations in their anatomical structure should act in exactly the same manner. Differences of structure must be accompanied by differences of function, physiological as well as psychological; and, as we found clear evidence of difference in structure between the races, so we must anticipate that differences in mental characteristics will be found. [...] As all structural differences are quantitative, we must expect to find mental differences to be of the same description, and as we found the variations in structure to overlap, so that many forms are common to individuals of all races, so we may expect that many individuals will not differ in regard to their faculty, while a statistical inquiry embracing the whole races would reveal certain differences. Furthermore, as certain anatomical traits are found to be hereditary in certain families and hence in tribes and perhaps even in peoples, in the same manner mental traits characterize certain families and may prevail among tribes. It seems, however, an impossible undertaking to separate in a satisfactory manner the social and the hereditary features. Galton's attempt to establish the laws of hereditary genius points out a way of treatment for these questions which will prove useful in so far as it opens a method of determining the influence of heredity upon mental qualities (Boas, 1974, p. 239)

We have shown that the anatomical evidence is such, that we may expect to find the races not equally gifted. While we have no right to consider one more ape-like than the other, the differences are such that some have probably greater mental vigor than others. The variations are, however, such that we may expect many individuals of all races to be equally gifted, while the number of men and women of higher ability will differ.(Boas, 1974, p. 242)

When discussing brain size, Boaz merely pointed to the
overlap among racial groups:

We find that 50 per cent of all whites have a capacity
of the skull greater than 1550 cc., while 27 per cent of the negroes and 32 per
cent of the Melanesians have capacities above this value. We might, therefore,
anticipate a lack of men of high genius, but should not anticipate any great
lack of faculty among the great mass of negroes living among whites and
enjoying the advantages of the leadership of the best men of that race. (Boas,
1974, pp. 233-234)

He did add that "mental ability certainly does
not depend upon the size of the brain alone." He then argued, quoting an
authority, that the encephalon and the cortex develop to a greater degree in
whites, especially after puberty:

When we compare the capacity for education between the
lower and higher races, we find that the great point of divergence is at
adolescence and the inference is fairly good that we shall not find in the
brains of the lower races the post-pubertal growth in the cortex to which I
have just alluded. (Boas, 1974, p. 234)

Boas would return to this topic, such as in this 1908
speech on "Race Problems in America":

I do not believe that the negro is, in his physical
and mental make-up, the same as the European. The anatomical differences are so
great that corresponding mental differences are plausible. There may exist
differences in character and in the direction of specific aptitudes. There is,
however, no proof whatever that these differences signify any appreciable
degree of inferiority of the negro, notwithstanding the slightly inferior size,
and perhaps lesser complexity of structure, of his brain; for these racial
differences are much less than the range of variation found in either race
considered by itself.(Boas, 1974, pp. 328-329)

All of these remarks must be judged in context. Boaz
was trying to stake out a reasonable middle ground in opposition to the view
that human races differ not only in degree but also in kind. There is also
little doubt about his opposition to racial discrimination, which he felt was
holding back many capable African Americans.

But he did not feel that equality of opportunity would
lead to equality of results. This was the middle ground he defended, and it is
far removed from today's middle ground. The two don't even overlap. What happened
between then and now?

Something critical seems to have happened in the late
1930s. When Boas prepared the second edition of The Mind of Primitive Man (1938),
he removed his earlier racialist statements. The reason was likely
geopolitical. As a Jewish American seeing the rise of Nazi Germany, he may have
felt that the fight against anti-Semitism would require a united front against
all forms of “racism”—a word just starting to enter common use and initially a
synonym for Nazism.

Boas died in 1942 and the leadership of his school of
anthropology fell to Ruth Benedict and Margaret Mead. With the end of the war,
both of them wished to pursue and even escalate the fight against racism.
Escalation was favored by several aspects of the postwar era: lingering
fears of a revival of anti-Semitism, competition between the two power
blocs for the hearts and minds of the Third World, and an almost utopian
desire to rebuild society—be it through socialism, social democracy, or new
liberalism … In all this, we are no longer in the realm of science, let alone
anthropology.

Boas had sought to strike a new balance between nature
and nurture in the study of Man. The war intervened, however, and Boasian
anthropology was conscripted to fight not only the Axis but also racism in any
form. Today, three-quarters of a century later, we’re still fighting that war.

References

Boas, F. (1974). A Franz Boas Reader. The Shaping
of American Anthropology, 1883-1911, G.W. Stocking Jr. (ed.), Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press.

Friday, July 4, 2014

Sigmund Freud (1856-1939) believed that the capacity for guilt varies
between individuals and among human populations. He also believed that this
variability had, in part, a heritable basis.

Humans are motivated to act correctly by either shame or guilt. We feel
shame after acting wrongly in the presence of others. We feel guilt even when
no one else sees us acting wrongful or even when we merely think about committing
a wrongful act. To varying degrees, all humans seem to have some capacity for
both shame and guilt. Most cultures, however, rely primarily on shame and only
a minority rely primarily on guilt. In the literature, the distinction between
the two is presented as one between non-Western and Western cultures or between
collectivistic and individualistic cultures. The capacity for guilt thus seems to be strongest
in populations of Northwest European descent.

From the time of Charles Darwin onward, this subject has attracted the
interest of several thinkers. How have they explained the origins of shame and
guilt?

Charles Darwin

Darwin speculated that shame originated from a universal desire to
"save face," which was initially concern about one's personal
appearance:

We have seen that in all parts of the world persons who feel shame for
some moral delinquency, are apt to avert, bend down, or hide their faces,
independently of any thought about their personal appearance. [...] And as the
face is the part of the body which is most regarded, it is intelligible that
any one ashamed of his personal appearance would desire to conceal this part of
his body. The habit, having been thus acquired, would naturally be carried on
when shame from strictly moral causes was felt; and it is not easy otherwise to
see why under these circumstances there should be a desire to hide the face more
than any other part of the body. (Darwin, 1872, p. 123)

Shame, however, is not the same as guilt, and Darwin took care to
distinguish between the two when discussing how and why people blush:

With respect to blushing from strictly moral causes, we meet with the
same fundamental principle as before, namely, regard for the opinion of others.
It is not the conscience which raises a blush, for a man may sincerely regret
some slight fault committed in solitude, or he may suffer the deepest remorse
for an undetected crime, but he will not blush. "I blush," says Dr.
Burgess, "in the presence of my accusers." It is not the sense of
guilt, but the thought that others think or know us to be guilty which crimsons
the face. A man may feel thoroughly ashamed at having told a small falsehood,
without blushing; but if he even suspects that he is detected he will instantly
blush, especially if detected by one whom he reveres. (Darwin, 1872, p. 126)

With respect to real shame from moral delinquencies, we can perceive why
it is not guilt, but the thought that others think us guilty, which raises a
blush. A man reflecting on a crime committed in solitude, and stung by his
conscience, does not blush; yet he will blush under the vivid recollection of a
detected fault, or of one committed in the presence of others, the degree of
blushing being closely related to the feeling of regard for those who have
detected, witnessed, or suspected his fault. Breaches of conventional rules of
conduct, if they are rigidly insisted on by our equals or superiors, often
cause more intense blushes even than a detected crime, and an act which is
really criminal, if not blamed by our equals, hardly raises a tinge of colour
on our cheeks. (Darwin, 1872, p. 130)

Darwin saw guilt as being not only less universal but also more recent
in origin:

The highest possible stage in moral culture is when we recognize that we
ought to control our thoughts, and "not even in inmost thought to think
again the sins that made the past so pleasant to us." (Darwin, 1936[1888],
p. 492)

A few lines further on, he suggested that this kind of mental discipline
is "more or less strongly inherited":

There is not the least inherent improbability, as it seems to me, in
virtuous tendencies being more or less strongly inherited; for, not to mention
the various dispositions and habits transmitted by many of our domestic animals
to their offspring, I have heard of authentic cases in which a desire to steal
and a tendency to lie appeared to run in families of the upper ranks: and as
stealing is a rare crime in the wealthy classes, we can hardly account by
accidental coincidence for the tendency occurring in two or three members of
the same family. If bad tendencies are transmitted, it is probable that good
ones are likewise transmitted. (Darwin, 1936[1888], p. 492)

Has the capacity for guilt been more strongly selected in some human
populations than in others? Darwin does not address this question, other than
to add:

Except through the principle of the transmission of moral tendencies, we
cannot understand the differences believed to exist in this respect between the
various races of mankind. (Darwin, 1936[1888], p. 493)

Sigmund Freud

In his work Civilization and Its Discontents (1930), Sigmund
Freud argued that guilt was initially a fear of discipline by close kin,
particularly one's father. Only later was this fear broadened to include fear
of discipline by non-kin, this change being related to the development of
larger human communities:

When an attempt is made to widen the community, the same conflict is
continued in forms which are dependent on the past; and it is strengthened and
results in a further intensification of the sense of guilt. Since civilization
obeys an internal erotic impulsion which causes human beings to unite in a
closely knit group, it can only achieve this aim through an ever-increasing
reinforcement of the sense of guilt. What began in relation to the father is
completed in relation to the group. If civilization is a necessary course of
development from the family to humanity as a whole, then [...] there is
inextricably bound up with it an increase of the sense of guilt, which will
perhaps reach heights that the individual finds hard to tolerate. (Freud, 1962,
pp. 79-80)

Guilt and shame are two means by which social rules are enforced in
large communities where most interactions are no longer with close kin. Shame
is enforced by external supervision, i.e., by other people who witness a
wrongful act. Guilt is enforced by internal supervision, i.e., by one's conscience,
which Freud called the super-ego:

We have also learned how the severity of the super-ego -- the demands of
conscience -- is to be understood. It is simply a continuation of the severity of
the external authority, to which it has succeeded and which it has in part
replaced (Freud, 1962, p. 74)

As the super-ego took over from paternal supervision and discipline, it
became not only more important but also more hardwired:

A great change takes place only when the authority is internalized
through the establishment of a super-ego. The phenomena of conscience then
reach a higher stage. Actually, it is not until now that we should speak of
conscience or a sense of guilt. At this point, too, the fear of being found out
comes to an end; the distinction, moreover, between doing something bad and
wishing to do it disappears entirely, since nothing can be hidden from the
super-ego, not even thoughts. It is true that the seriousness of the situation
from a real point of view has passed away, for the new authority, the super-ego,
has no motive that we know of for ill-treating the ego, with which it is
intimately bound up; but genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what
is past and has been surmounted, makes itself felt in the fact that
fundamentally things remain as they were at the beginning. The super-ego
torments the sinful ego with the same feeling of anxiety and is on the watch
for opportunities of getting it punished by the external world. (Freud, 1962,
p. 72)

The translation is awkward (the original was in German), but he seems to
be referring to the heritability of traits that have proven their adaptiveness
over time, i.e., "genetic influence, which leads to the survival of what
is past and has been surmounted." This heritable component seems to be a
capacity, or a willingness, to identify social rules and comply with them, the
actual rules being non-innate, i.e., "softwired." This notion of an
innate, heritable component comes up again a few pages later:

Experience shows, however, that the severity of the super-ego which a
child develops in no way corresponds to the severity of treatment which he has
himself met with. The severity of the former seems to be independent of that of
the latter. A child who has been very leniently brought up can acquire a very
strict conscience. But it would also be wrong to exaggerate this independence;
it is not difficult to convince oneself that severity of upbringing does also
exert a strong influence on the formation of the child's super-ego. What it
amounts to is that in the formation of the super-ego and the emergence of a
conscience innate constitutional factors and influences from the real
environment act in combination. This is not at all surprising; on the contrary,
it is a universal aetiological condition for all such processes. (Freud, 1962,
p. 77)

Freud also argued that people differ in their capacity for guilt. In a
footnote to the above passage, he explained that the super-ego emerged through
"gradual transitions" and thus exists to varying degrees in different
people: "[...] it is not merely a question of the existence of the
super-ego but of its relative strength and sphere of influence" (Freud,
1962, p. 72). Some individuals are thus extremely guilt-prone:

For the more virtuous a man is, the more severe and distrustful is its
[the conscience's] behavior, so that ultimately it is precisely those people
who have carried saintliness furthest who reproach themselves with the worst
sinfulness. (Freud, 1962, pp. 73-74)

These statements may seem surprising. Didn't Freud believe that neuroses
are due to learned inhibitions and that we ought to overcome our inhibitions?
Here, however, he argues that both the inhibition of behavior and the
expectation of inhibition are instinctual. There has thus been a co-evolution between
the internal control mechanism (the super-ego) and human desires (the ego):

The sense of guilt, the harshness of the super-ego, is thus the same
things as the severity of the conscience. It is the perception which the ego
has of being watched over in this way, the assessment of the tension between
its own strivings and the demands of the super-ego. The fear of this critical
agency [...] the need for punishment, is an instinctual manifestation on the
part of the ego, which has become masochistic under the influence of a sadistic
super-ego; it is a portion, that is to say, of the instinct toward internal
destruction present in the ego [...] (Freud, 1962, p. 83)

When this control mechanism enters into conflict with human desires, the
result is a "conflict between the two primal instincts" (Freud, 1962,
p. 84).

We must distinguish between the real Freud and the one of undergrad
courses. The latter Freud has become a mouthpiece for beliefs, like rejection
of biological determinism and rejection of inhibitions, that did not become
dominant until after his death. The real Freud believed that mental and
behavioral traits have a substantial heritable basis, as did most scholars of
his day. By emphasizing the importance of both nature and nurture, he was in
fact taking a very middle-of-the-road position ... for his time. The middle
ground would not shift toward environmental determinism until later, with
growing interest in the findings of Ivan Petrovich Pavlov and subsequent
efforts by the Boasian school of anthropology to explain human behavior in
terms of cultural conditioning.

To be continued

References

Darwin, C. (1936) [1888]. The Descent of Man and Selection in
relation to Sex. reprint of 2nd ed., The Modern Library, New York: Random
House.

Darwin, C. (1872). The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals,
London: Murray.

Welcome to my blog! For the most part, this page will be an extension of my website, with comments relating to my research. But it will also branch out into more general discussions of human evolution.